At least when it’s his.
Have you heard about the president who received money from China and other foreign countries? No, not the current president. The former one.
House Republicans recently launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, premised on the claim that he is hiding, in the words of Speaker Mike Johnson, “millions of dollars in payments from America’s foreign adversaries.” As yet, they have produced no evidence to back up the idea that Biden profited. (The payments they have flagged involve the business interests of his son Hunter Biden, who is facing two separate federal indictments at the moment, and his brother James.)
David A. Graham: Republicans are playing house
Meanwhile, House Democrats on Thursday released a report detailing how former President Donald Trump received, and then tried to hide, millions in payments from America’s foreign adversaries. Unlike in the impeachment inquiry, which is premised on a suspicion that Republicans hope will turn up evidence, the receipts are here.
“President Trump’s businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign
payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency,” the report finds. “These included payments from foreign governments and foreign government–owned or –controlled entities to properties owned by Donald Trump,” including hotels and office buildings. And the report notes that other payments may exist to other Trump-related entities that didn’t show up in the investigation.
The contrast between the wisps of smoke in the Biden investigation and the torrid flames of the Trump case is a reminder that although Trump has been a major driver of the impeachment inquiry into Biden, his own behavior on any given question is usually worse than his adversaries’. Not only is there always a tweet; there’s usually a scandal.
“Many reports get published in Congress every year and sink into oblivion, but this one is unlikely to disappear,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote in a foreword. This is optimistic. The report made much less of a splash on its release than it should have, for predictable reasons: Trump-loving audiences simply ignore it or rationalize it, while Trump-skeptical ones have long assumed that he’s on the take.
The saga of the foreign payments is a good case study in how Trump has taught Americans to tolerate brazen corruption—so long as it’s his. To do this, Trump relies on two tactics. First, he does much of it out in the open, recognizing that voters tend to assume that only hidden deeds are nefarious. Second, he finds ways to slow-walk the release of the most damaging information, so that by the time the full picture is clear, the public has become almost inoculated—as though it had been out in the open all along.
The present report stems from Democrats’ allegation that Trump was violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars the president from receiving money from foreign governments. In some ways, Trump’s intention to violate the ban was clear from the start. Before taking office, he announced that he would not take any meaningful steps to prevent financial conflicts of interest. His hotel in Washington promptly became a see-and-be-seen-running-up-expense-accounts magnet for both Republicans and foreign governments. But spotting an apparent emoluments-clause violation and punishing it are two different things. In summer 2017, House Democrats sued Trump for violating the law, but their suit was stalled and eventually tossed for lack of standing.
After Democrats won the House majority in 2018, they quickly moved to flex their oversight powers on the issue. They subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, in April 2019, but Trump engaged in a long legal effort to prevent Mazars from handing over documents. He lost repeatedly, including at the Supreme Court in 2020, before an agreement was finally reached in September 2022 to provide documents to Congress. Two months later, Republicans won control of the House, and once in power began unwinding the agreement. Still, Democrats were able to obtain some documents, on which this report is based.
It’s now been roughly seven years since the first accusations of an emoluments-clause violation emerged. In that time, voters got used to the idea of Trump bringing in millions of dollars from overseas sources, first by his doing it in the open, and second by his ensuring that the actual hard numbers would drip out slowly.
He’s used the same maneuver effectively elsewhere. In his first impeachment, for example, Trump was accused of trying to deploy the powers of the presidency to get foreign governments to intervene in American elections on his behalf. As Congress investigated, Trump kept at it, openly calling for foreign interference and obstructing Congress, so that the most damning details emerged gradually, blunting their impact and leaving time for patsies like Senator Lindsey Graham to invent justifications for erasing their own redlines on quid pro quos. And as I recently wrote as part of The Atlantic’s “If Trump Wins” package, he’s already normalizing the idea that he’d lock up generals or reporters or Biden if reelected.
From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump isn’t bluffing
Trump’s reflexive defenders are always eager to help. Republican James Comer, the House Oversight chair who has led the charge against Biden, dismissed the report. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses, but the Bidens do not,” he said in a statement. But this not only begs the question; it is beside the point. Whether Trump’s business is legitimate doesn’t hold any bearing on whether he violated the emoluments clause. And whether he violated the emoluments clause doesn’t have much bearing on whether it’s ethically acceptable for the president to receive money from the Chinese government—a principle that Republicans have little trouble grasping as it pertains to Biden’s (hypothesized) earnings.
Less than a month ago, Sean Hannity dreamed about just this scenario. “I cannot, for the life of me, you know, imagine what the media and how the country and the left in this country would be reacting if Donald Trump and the Trump Organization or the Trump family were making tens of millions of dollars from our top geopolitical foes like China and Russia,” he said. “I can’t imagine the left in this country not going insane, but lo and behold, here we are.”
For once, Hannity gave the press and the left too much credit.
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